About minerat

minerat’s Comments

I see where you're coming from, but I don't think he made a moral equivalence. He was just paring down his argument to the most objective (or lease objectionable) level to show how strong it still is even if you discount everything an opponent might disagree with.

You're well known in the industry and have a huge predisposition to Susan's argument and advocate for many of the things she's saying. You didn't misrepresent yourself at all, and that's not why your review was discounted. It was simply to remove reviews with any possible perception of bias. Your review is honest and forthright, but it's not unbiased. As it is, I happen to agree with you and support the Free Press, and this is still how I saw the whole point.

Arstechnica made a really good point about CBS's decision and CNET's disclosure. The disclosure really doesn't make it better because it doesn't just affect reviews of the products from companies with which CBS is involved in litigation, it affects reviews of all products in the same category because they won't be compared to all possible alternatives (and this probably won't be disclosed in every gadget review where a competing product has been blacklisted). It undermines their credibility far more than it superficially appears.

Incubus really has understood the changing music landscape for a while now. It's not surprising, they're all a bunch smart and well spoken guys (Brandon here, Mike, the guitarist, just finished a music degree at harvard, etc) and they've been doing cool stuff for a while - live bootlegs in 04, direct management engagement with fans through unofficial fan forums (which helped push for a wildly successful south american tour in 2005), and direct individual band member engagement with fans for years all the way back to early myspace.

The were at the SF MusicTech Summit last year (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUiBb9ZVCTA) and when asked specifically about the leak of their new album they said:

"It was like, for about a day, where it felt like someone had broken into your house and had taken something you were making... kick in the balls a little bit. But a day later I realized that it took away the fear that people don't want music any more. That really reinforces that they really want it - they want to take it before you're even done with it.... we're in this weird middle zone, we don't get paid per record sold, out job is to make music and play concerts... we realized we're not the ones in control of it anymore... I'm just thrilled that people are not only enthusiastic about music, but love our music so much that they want to steal it".

His attorney provides a solid background and thoroughly dismantles each of FunnyJunk's original claims, and suggests that FunnyJunk hasn't registered their DMCA agent with the copyright office. That oversight could negate their Safe Harbor defense regarding The Oatmeal's content being posted by FunnyJunk's users.

I'm a huge defender of privacy; I use browser plug-ins to block tracking cookies and I would be the first to criticize anyone who violates privacy, but didn't this bypass allow them to do exactly what's automatically allowed on every other browser? From what I read, no one selected these settings - it's just the default, abnormal behavior of Safari. Working around it only affects people signed into Google services - allowing them to do things like +1 ads. If I've misunderstood the situation, I'd definitely like to know.

Without proof of who is actually uploading, it's a pretty good assumption that the uploads come from someone involved in the company. There is no proof to the contrary.
Right, but the company is supposed to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Hell, all the investigating agency had to do was, you know, investigate the site to see that they have hundreds of thousands of users and are proactive in combating phishing. Then do something crazy like contacting the owners to see if they respond / can provide useful information about the problem form(s).

JotForm.com has been suspended by Godaddy for more than 24 hours now. They have disabled the DNS without any prior notice or request. They have told us the domain name was suspended as part of an ongoing law enforcement investigation. In order to resolve the issue, they asked us to contact the officer in charge at U. S. Secret Service.

When I contacted the Secret Service, the agent told me she is busy and she asked for my phone number, and told me they will get back to me within this week. I told them we are a web service with hundreds of thousands of users, so this is a matter of urgency, and we are ready to cooperate fully. I was ready to shutdown any form they request and provide any information we have about the user. Unfortunately, she told me she needs to look at the case which she can do in a few days. I called her many times again to check about the case, but she seems to be getting irritated with me. At this point, we are waiting for them to look into our case.

Our guess is that this is probably about a phishing form. We take phishing very seriously. Our Bayesian phishing filter has suspended 65.000 accounts last year. We have been training it for many years, so it can detect phishing forms with great accuracy. We also take any reports about phishing very seriously and quickly suspend the accounts and let the other party know about it. By the way, we are also very serious about false positives. If we suspend an account accidentally, we will quickly resolve the issue, and apologize.

I believe this can happen to anybody who allows users to create content on the web. So, if you have such business, my recommendation would be to make sure that you can contact your most active users quickly if your domain is disabled. Many of our users are shocked and angry at us. But, many also thanked us for quickly letting them know about the issue by email and providing instructions to continue operating their forms. Since DNS propagation takes some time, many active users were able to switch their forms to the new domain before it went down. We still have not contacted all users, we are sending emails most active users first.

That's an interesting legal theory. Is there *any* precedent for it, specifically interacting with a publicly accessible service in an unapproved manner being ruled making a derivative of the original? That really sounds like a load of crap, as the application never includes or accesses craigslist code, and the only infringement is redisplaying public elements of the site in in a different window.

I only mentioned the gun because it's a center city Philadelphia theater and there was a double shooting there last year (http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/local&id=7221808). I hadn't been to the theater in a while and assumed the metal detecting wand was part of their response to that incident. It was only after we saw two other people bagging up phones that we realized we had the metal detector was only being used to enforce the no phones rule. It seemed totally ridiculous given the context.

In response to a couple other comments:

The guard didn't care about the gun - I don't think my friend showed his license (as others pointed out, only law enforcement can require you to do so) and I'm not even sure he showed it to the guard - when the wand beeped I think he just said it was his legally registered and licensed firearm and that was it.

I never downloaded the movie, so I don't know for certain if the xvid screener posted to a.b.movies 3 months ago is legit, but it wasn't tagged as password protected like many other crap posts, so I assumed it was good. If not, it doesn't detract from the ridiculousness of all this effort for a movie that was publicly released 2 hours after the viewing and highly likely to be leaked via screener anyway (just like most other Oscar contenders).